Effect of Changing Costs
In these examples, we show how the assumptions about costs affect the solution. In each figure, the green planning units are from the original solution (BM = 0.2), which set Cost = Area + Suitability. Red shows the solution if Cost = Area only (left), if Cost = 0 (center, all planning units cost the same), and when a cost threshold of 1 million is assigned (right). The threshold is similar to a budget constraint, except that not all costs are in economic units.